Retail stores are often looking for ways to improve a customer's shopping experience by changing or optimizing certain retail practices. One such retail practice is associated with sale finalization, which may not only enhance a customer's shopping experience but also increase overall sales. Sale finalization generally relates to the process of completing a sale of one or more items at a point of sale (POS) terminal in which the POS terminal is typically fixed near a store exit and equipped with a tag deactivator for disabling security tags, e.g., acousto-magnetic (AM), electronic article surveillance (“EAS”) tags, associated with a purchased item. The tag deactivator is often built-in to the POS terminal or attached to the POS terminal using a cable.
While sale finalization is straight forward in concept, optimizing sales finalization is an often recurring problem on retail store floors. Sale finalization at fixed POS terminals often suffers at times when sale finalization should be maximized, e.g., when there is a large influx of customers over a relatively short period of time. For example, a customer may walk around a retail store floor browsing items and select some of these items for purchase. However, the customer may end up waiting in line at a point of sale (POS) terminal for five, ten or even twenty minutes to purchase the selected items, not to mention the time it takes to locate and walk to the POS terminal. Greater wait time often results in increased customer dissatisfaction and may even cause the customer to abandon a shopping cart of selected items in order to avoiding having to wait in line.
In order to help address the problem of poor sales optimization, some retail stores have implemented mobile POS terminals, which allows customers to checkout from almost anywhere on the sales floor. In particular, a mobile POS terminal may be a handheld device such as a tablet computer carried by a store associate that enables the associate to charge the customer for items. The mobile POS terminal creates an invoice of the checkout transaction, charge payment, e.g., using the customer's credit card, generate a receipt, e.g., electronic receipt, and send details of the sale to the store's backend system for processing, e.g., updating the store's sales totals and inventory database. Mobile POS terminals are not only less complex to implement than fixed POS terminals but may be dynamically deployed throughout the store depending on fluctuations of customer traffic. For example, every employee in the store may be able to operate a respective mobile POS terminal such that customers can checkout from anywhere in the store where an employee is located, i.e., each employee with the handheld device becomes a mobile POS terminal. The mobile POS terminal scheme enhances sales finalization while helping to increase customer satisfaction.
While mobile POS terminals provide many benefits, these terminals are not without faults. In particular, a mobile POS terminal often requires the use of a tag deactivator to disable security tags of the items being purchased. The tag deactivator is an essential checkout tool used at a POS terminal to deactivate security tags associated with a purchased item. However, the added mobility of a mobile POS terminal and an associated tag deactivator makes the tag deactivator more vulnerable to misuse, and may end up causing the retail store a substantial amount in lost inventory and profits. For example, a tag deactivator located away from a fixed POS terminal increases the accessibility of the deactivator to mobile POS terminals but also to unauthorized users such as thieves.
Moreover, while having a deactivator locked to a secure location, built-in to a fixed POS terminal or attached with a cable to the fixed POS terminal to prevent unauthorized use of the deactivator, these security measures inhibit the mobility of tag deactivators as a mobile POS terminal will have to be located near the tag deactivator in order to deactivate tags for checkout. In other words, while retail stores may take steps to secure tag deactivators, the steps may end up reducing the effectiveness of mobile POS terminals.